Design and early results of the sodium-layer laser guide star adaptive optics experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Details Design and early results of the sodium-layer laser guide star adaptive optics experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Design and early results of the sodium-layer laser guide star adaptive optics experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Jul 1993

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993stin...9432189g&link_type=abstract

Presented at the ICO-16 Satellite Conference on Active and Adaptive Optics, Garching, Germany, 2-5 Aug. 1993

Physics

Optics

Adaptive Optics, Atmospheric Optics, Imaging Techniques, Laser Guidance, Reference Stars, Star Trackers, Telescopes, Atmospheric Turbulence, Light (Visible Radiation), Mesosphere, Near Infrared Radiation, Point Sources, Wave Front Deformation

Scientific paper

Adaptive optic systems promise to give diffraction limited performance to ground based telescopes operating at visible and near infrared wavelengths. However, because of the short spatial scale of atmospheric turbulence, the corrected field of view is limited to only a few arc seconds in the visible and to perhaps 10 arc seconds at L band (3.5 mu). A bright point source must be in this field of view as a wavefront reference, but the number density of natural stars is too small for full sky coverage at imaging wavelengths less than 3 mu. A sufficiently bright point source can be artificially generated by a laser, however, and investigations into the use of laser beacons has been proceeding for some time now. Our experiments at Livermore have concentrated on the formation of guide stars in the sodium mesospheric layer at 90 km altitude. We have also designed and built adaptive optics systems that use both artificial and natural guide stars. Experimental results to date have shown great promise for the practicality of this technique in astronomy.

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